Since the dawn of time, writers—especially poets—have tried to present to their audiences the essence of a thing or a feeling. They do this in a variety of ways. The American writer Gertrude Stein, for example, worked with repetition in her prose and famously claimed that in her line “Rose is a rose is a rose” “the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” She took a different approach in Tender Buttons, offering what has been called verbal cubism and attempting with sound and rhythm to examine objects, rooms, and food. While not always successful, it is excellent fun to read aloud to the like-minded. Wallace Stevens too in his poem “13 Ways of Looking a Blackbird” takes the position that essence can be derived from several perspectives.We wanted to rise to the challenge. Like Stevens’s poem, but not half so brilliantly, this feature will examine a “blackbird” from different perspectives. It is impressionistic. The subject is not always a blackbird.

13The bird’s eye view

"Among twenty snowy mountains, / The only moving thing / Was the eye of the blackbird." Not just human perspective on the blackbird (or whatever subject matter) matters, but the perspective of the viewed as well.

12Simile

"I was of three minds, / Like a tree / In which there are three blackbirds."A simile of the human mind at work. The scribe takes the stylus and creates a bird with a few strokes. Over the miles and the decades it becomes an abstract figure. Is the meaning the same?

11Hollow bones

bone: birds

“The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. / It was a small part of the pantomime."To fly. A small child is weeping. Though he has been stirred for many weeks by the thought of flying to see Europe. As the event approaches, he has grown inexplicably sad whenever the subject is mentioned. When his mother says she thought he wanted to go and asks him whatever is wrong, he says, suddenly sobbing, “I haven’t learned how to flyyet.”

10One

egg: bird eggscredit: Encylopædia Britannica, Inc.

“A man and a woman / Are one. / A man and a woman and a blackbird / Are one.”The philosophy of oneness (unity), creation and procreation, bird and egg.

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9Nature Notes

“I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.”The incomparable Derwent May captured joy in his quiet column “Nature Notes” for The Times of London. In fact, many nature writers seem to have a gift for acute reportage. Even the writers about birds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology wax poetic about the red-winged blackbird’s song: “The male Red-winged Blackbird’s conk-la-ree! is a classic sound of wetlands across the continent. The one-second song starts with an abrupt note that turns into a musical trill. Males often sing from a high perch while leaning forward, drooping their wings, spreading their tail feathers, and fluffing their bright shoulder patches to show them off. Females give a very different song in response to a singing male, a series of three to five short chit or check notes.”

8Soul cakes

“Icicles filled the long window / Withbarbaric glass. / The shadow of the blackbird / Crossed it, to and fro. / Themood / Traced in the shadow / An indecipherable cause.”The dead of winter brings on shivers of chill and, if the light is just right, the creepy. Who is that tapping at the window? Funny how some slight movement detected in your peripheral vision can give you a start and bring to mind all the eerie stories you’ve ever heard.

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7Golden birds

red-winged blackbirdcredit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

“O thin men of Haddam, / Why do you imaginegolden birds? / Do you not see how the blackbird / Walks around the feet / Ofthe women about you?”You miss what is in front of you when your thoughts are elsewhere. The everyday, the ordinary, the routine is made new and quite other when you simply perceive what is in front of you.

6Avian consciousness

African weavercredit: Tony Heald/Nature Picture Library

“I know noble accents / And lucid, inescapable rhythms; / But I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know.”In the springtime, you can watch the birds plucking grasses from the experimental patches in the botanic garden. They do this to carry out their lot in life—to do what it is they do. If you’re lucky, you can see them using confetti from a spent popper for the same purpose. They do that and we do something else, but both are the same. It is Margaret you mourn for.

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5Flight

feather, parts of credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

“When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.”Another specialization of birds—an essence of bird—is the feather.

4OH!

“At the sight of blackbirds / Flying in a green light, / Even the bawds of euphony / Would cry out sharply.”A black bird known as a crow would surely alarm the bawds of cacophony.

3Shadows

batcredit: W. Perry Conway/Corbis

“He rode over Connecticut / In a glass coach. / Once, a fear pierced him, / In that he mistook / The shadow of his equipage / For blackbirds.”The built-in fear factor. Their connotation is not good, even when you are flying over Connecticut in a glass coach. Whose shadow is that you see? Bird? Bat? Is it about to strike? Menace.

2Present continuous

Archaeopteryxcredit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

“The river is moving. / The blackbird must be flying.”The ancient signifiers are ever here. One means the other.

1Now

rusty blackbirdcredit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

“It was evening all afternoon. / It was snowing / And it was going to snow. / The blackbird sat / In the cedar-limbs.”Thus has it been. Thus shall it ever be. No matter who is looking or for how long.